


The Last Goodbye at the End of Their Crossroads

by LittleDesertFlower



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Bittersweet, Canon Compliant, Episode Fix-It: s04e13 Journey's End, F/M, Fix-It, Not Beta Read, Novelization, One Shot, Retelling, Season/Series 04
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-23
Updated: 2020-06-23
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:40:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24883987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleDesertFlower/pseuds/LittleDesertFlower
Summary: There was a sentence once that started with ‘Rose Tyler’, a sentence he never finished, a sentence he couldn’t finish. The day he could, he didn’t, because it hurt too much to wonder about the implications. But what if the ending of that sentence had needed saying? What if he’d needed to say it?
Relationships: Tenth Doctor/Rose Tyler
Kudos: 14





	The Last Goodbye at the End of Their Crossroads

**Author's Note:**

> It helps to be very familiar with _Doomsday_ and generally follow what happened in Series 1-4. Plenty of references ahead of other series, too! Tiny but definitely there.

How does it feel like to leave part of his life behind, safe on the ground, knowing the hardest part is still not over? How does it feel to walk back in, chin up, the words still echoing inside his head— _you act like such a lonely man, but look at you, you’ve got the biggest family on Earth—_ and have to do what he’s always done?

The family is a bit smaller than minutes ago, but the ones that are left have gathered around the console. They always do that, perhaps because they’ve always seen him do the same. All of time and all of space, they like to be at the center of it. Wandering is for guideless travelers that follow stars.

Worn knobs and levers, crooks and crannies that have taken him to places he’s barely survived by the skin on his teeth… When he turns them, their noise follows him into the darkest corners of the universe. It’s what he needs now, noise.

“Just time for one last trip,” he mutters, almost to himself, careful not to let them hear. “Dårlig Ulv Stranden. Better known as…”

But he never finishes that thought. His other self understands it across the room. Bad Wolf Bay. Those three words, right there, are what it feels like. Exactly what it feels like, to travel and to leave. To say goodbye. To have a big family that fractures itself with each trip. To land alone one day. To _have_ to land alone. His other self understands, and that only makes the loneliness resonate more deeply inside his own ribcage.

He has to turn the lever anyway.

* * *

The noise fades into the soft thud of four solid corners against wet sand. There was never, ever, a TARDIS here. Just the reflection of a man in a suit, with eyes as old as the universe, as tired as a god’s. Now, the Doctor lets his once companion, her mother, and his other self open the doors first, into the foggy Norwegian morning, and takes his time picking up and putting on his coat—takes his time _making time._ He was never here either, and he doesn’t want to be.

“You alright?” Donna asks him. She’s stayed behind with him, staring at everything with her big round eyes, which now hide the same secrets his do.

“Yeah, come on.”

The ghost of his hand on her back guides her out.

His fingers catch on the TARDIS door when he begins to close it on his way out, but he is good at nonchalance, and he is even better at pretending that the sight of the deserted beach and the blonde woman inspecting him doesn’t make his hearts pound in his chest, his memories swirl in spirals that have no end, his knees shake at the prospect of ‘later’. He remembers a ‘later’, not that long ago.

She stood at a similar distance, then, too. Only she was crying and smiling at the same time. And it wasn’t the end. He didn’t know it, but it wasn’t the end.

“Hold on, this is the parallel universe, right?” Rose says now.

Same place, different time. And this time they’re both here.

“You’re back home,” he tells Rose, as he and Donna approach the rest.

“And the walls of the world are closing again, now that the Reality Bomb never happened. It’s dimensional retroclosure,” Donna says, earning herself a smile from the Other Doctor. “See, I really get that stuff now.”

The Doctor nods approvingly at her. Anything, anything to not be where he is, not participate in this moment again. There are three versions of him standing in the same bay. Two hybrids, one Time Lord. And yet—

“No, but I spent all that time trying to _find_ you. I’m not going back now.”

—all he can do is _be_ here. Walk closer to Rose. Because now he is here. Back then, he was on a TARDIS, using solar energy to project an image of himself.

“But you’ve got to. Because we saved the universe, but at a cost. And the cost is him.” The Doctor points at his other self, who stands in the background, knowing too much, keeping it all quiet because he must. He will have all his life to speak. To find himself in the aftermath of his own chaos. And what a blessing it is, to have that. “He destroyed the Daleks. He committed genocide. He’s too dangerous to be left on his own.”

“You made me,” the Other Doctor complains.

“Exactly.”

The Doctor made him, from his own flesh, into a hybrid. From a hybrid… into a new Doctor who was left alone in a position where genocide was the only answer to save humanity and his friends. _Yes, I made you. Twice. Now I have to unmake you. Like they all do me._

“You were born in battle, full of blood and anger and revenge.” The Doctor turns to Rose, to the woman who first dared look through the ashes of all those wars and saw a person worth sticking around for. “Remind you of someone?” Rose glances down at the sand where she once stood, alone, after an incomplete goodbye that wasn’t the end, but was. “That’s me.” He insists upon the past, the only thing he will always have. “When we first met.” As her eyes face him again, he realizes they are full of tears. “And you made me better.” She’d made everything better, breathed life into a Dalek to the point that it’d recognized love. And she’d stopped the Doctor from massacring too many and too much. No one else _saw_ and no one else could. “Now you can do the same for him.”

Even so, right now, Rose sheds all her tears for the Doctor that she’s already losing, not the new one standing in front of her, dressed in blue and purple, about to promise her what no Doctor has even spoken aloud. Her tears, too, are shed for the past the Doctor treasures. The past that won’t come again.

“But he’s not you.” It’s not angry, it’s not defiant, it’s just… the truth.

A truth that makes the Other Doctor tremble where he stands and the Doctor close his eyes, seeking a peace inside him that has never existed, not since he stared into the Untempered Schism.

It’s not sad, it’s not pained, when he softly says, “He needs you.” It’s the largest expression of vulnerability he has ever given a person in his long, long life. Larger than admitting to anything else. “That’s very me.”

“But it’s better than that, though,” Donna tells Rose. “Don’t you see what he’s trying to give you?” She turns to the Other Doctor. “Tell her. Go on.”

“I look like him and I think like him. Same memories, same thoughts, same everything,” he says. “Except I’ve only got one heart.”

“Which means?” Rose says.

“I’m part human.” Standing close enough, worlds away, the Doctor cowers away from what his other self says, because these words will change everything, the words that he doesn’t want spoken. The truth that makes him a bigger coward that refusing to shoot guns at the enemy or saying what needs to be said before the chasm closes. “Specifically, the aging part,” the Other Doctor says, slow and steady; but firmly, because he knows. “I’ll grow old and never regenerate.” Saying this makes the Other Doctor a better Doctor, a braver Doctor. “I’ve only got one life, Rose Tyler. I could spend it with you,” he says, just to check, “if you want.”

Without even closing her eyes, she can see it. The turn of the earth made person, a helix of light inside a machine, exploding into rearranged atoms. The face that emerged, human-looking yet never just that, wasn’t the face Rose loved, but she grew to love it. A face that has regenerated into itself… twice. Twice, in front of her.

She never—never _dreamed,_ not once, of that face in the mirror, next to hers. Not even when they were under the imminent darkness of the black hole and she joked and he joked back, and for a moment there, she could almost _see_ it. The Doctor always belonged to humanity, to the universe, she was just the lucky one who got to see why for a little while, who got to toy around with ‘forever’ in a time machine.

“You’ll g-grow old at the same time as me?” Her voice almost breaks at the realization.

The Other Doctor nods. “Together.”

“But… it can’t be. If you’re him, then…” Rose shakes her head. She’s unaware of her own smile, small and disbelieving, as she reaches for him with a trembling hand, for the chest where she still expects two hearts to be beating strong, despite everything.

And he undoes the buttons on his jacket, gently taking her hand and guiding it inside. Through the thin fabric of his t-shirt, she feels it. It jumps at her like the chirping of birds in the morning.

“One heart,” she mutters wetly.

Her back turned to him, she never sees the smile on the Doctor’s face, glad for someone else’s future for the briefest of seconds, a smile that collapses into dust and ash the moment the TARDIS tolls like a church bell.

Time is calling.

Rose answers its call when she turns to face him, and the blue box, and time itself.

But it is _time_.

“We’ve got to go,” the Doctor says. He doesn’t want to see the tears on that woman’s eyes, streaming down her face as she strives for a calmness neither of them are feeling. “This reality is sealing itself off… forever.”

Perhaps it’s selfish to want not to see, but it’s in his power. And it’s what the universes need, if he’s to restore them to how they were before all this.

He and Donna turn around.

“But—” Rose stutters.

He keeps walking, grinding his teeth. If he stops moving, for just one second, then he will stop forever. And his universe needs the Doctor. He can’t stay, he’s never stayed. He’s not the one that gets to.

It’s other people that follow him.

Rose runs to his side. Rose, who always came back, even when she shouldn’t.

“—it’s still not right, ’cause the Doctor’s… still you,” she tells him.

And he faces her, just a little, just a little more than out of the corner of his eye. A little, enough to end this before it just ends.

“And I’m him.”

Him, the Other Doctor who stays in the background, not talking. Because he knows something. And Rose has been playing these games for far too long, hopping between realities to find the impossible over, and over again, to give up now on the very last clue of the puzzle. It’s not just one heart, one life. It’s not just goodbye. It’s not just three Doctors, and she gets to live out the rest of her days with one. The Doctor, the real Doctor, is leaving like something has broken into a million pieces, and he’s leaving, his final word standing as self-sacrifice for her.

Rose takes a step towards him. In the old times, he’d take one towards her. Now, he stays anchored to the sand. He looks more like a reflection now than he ever did then when he didn’t know how to say goodbye, and yet still did a better job at it than he is now.

“All right. Then answer me this,” she says, and her words finally pull him to her. “When I last stood on this beach, on the worst day of my life… what was the last thing you said to me?” The ghost of it stands between them, hovering in his mind. The transmission cut midway. He never said it. He never got it out. And now he doesn’t want to. Rose knows, he knows that she knows, and she will have none of that, he’s sure. “Go on, say it.”

A ghost… of happier times. Because he would have said it, then, if the universe had been kinder. He had been ready to say it. The one and only time he would have, the one and only time it was taken from him.

And yet he almost smiles now at the peaceful memory of those tears they both shed that day, on the worst day they both ever lived. He has lived and died too many times to count, but losing her really felt like something had cut off his life source, left him breathless on a deserted planet to run out of oxygen on coarse sand.

“I said, Rose Tyler,” he says. Clearly. Slowly. Without pause or pain.

“Yeah, and how was that sentence going to end?”

Her sadness makes him hesitate in the space between heartbeats. In all those things he has seen and faced, hesitation was the furthest thing in his mind. Churns and churns of data, of plans waiting to happen. Too many ideas waving each other into improbable schemes.

“Does it need saying?” he barely mutters.

The pain does hit him, then. At the memories, at the fact that this time, there will be no end to that sentence when he leaves. No tunnel between worlds. When the breach closes, it closes for real. And yet he still can’t say it. He loses people, he keeps losing people. How can he ever feel safe loving them?

Rose Tyler, the woman who ran with him, the woman who stayed with him. The one who came back, who travelled the dimensions to find him. And now she’s looking at him like she’s never known him, like maybe he was right, and the Other Doctor will be more of a fit for her. He closes his eyes and reminds himself that this is what he’s always done. What he will always do.

No one can ever run away with him forever. No one. Even if they want to. Even if he dreams of the day they will.

When he opens his eyes again, he mumbles things to the silence that only the silence will be able to carry Rose’s way when it’s time, when it’s right. But now, the walls of this reality must close.

The last look he takes at her—crying, angry, and still as stubborn and resolute as those years ago, when he met her out of chance—burns his eyelids as he and Donna walk away, to the TARDIS. The last touch of Rose’s skin burns him when he opens those doors, just to feel the Norwegian air for a little longer—just to feel the last connection to her fade until a time machine severs it. His personal goodbye. One nobody ever knows about. The Doctor lingers because he can’t ever stay.

“That’s it?” Rose shouts at him. “So you’re just going to go?”

Those words and their meaning linger, too. A howling echo in a bay where the crashing of the waves should already be loud enough.

“The second you get on that TARDIS, I’ll turn around and he’ll tell me,” Rose says, looking briefly at the Other Doctor, “won’t you?”

“Someone has to. And he can’t,” the Other Doctor says. “You know why he can’t.”

One Doctor born in rage and war, one Doctor living in fear of loving too hard, in fear of having that love stripped away from him once more. Because it always is.

“Can’t you see?” Rose says. “I’m not the one you’re leaving here stranded without a proper goodbye, Doctor.”

The TARDIS tolls a second time, hurrying them. It is time to leave. It is time for goodbyes… or the hole that is left behind if there are none.

“You’re stranding yourself,” Rose finishes quietly.

Donna leans into the Doctor’s ear, to whisper something only he will hear, keeping his secrets. “She’s right… When the walls close again, not even the energy of a thousand suns could…”

But he doesn’t register what she says next. He only hears himself, in the past, and his own hope that day when he stood next to a star. _Burning up a sun,_ he’d spoken, _just to say goodbye._

Another goodbye, only this time it’s a thousand times worse because he’s refusing it, taking refuge and excusing himself on the one he and Rose had time ago. The one that now doesn’t—can’t—stand. Sometimes the simple act of living on rewrites history in a much more painful way than the Doctor fears he might one day, if he steps into the wrong ripple, at the wrong time, creating a tidal wave. It rewrites personal history that can be remembered by everyone involved, not just him. It hurts to not be able to run away from that and still try to… because it’s all he’s ever known.

“I’m gonna have another you here for the rest of my life! You’re never gonna see _me_ again!” Rose sniffs. “What was the end of that sentence?!

And the funny thing is that she doesn’t even want to hear it for herself. It’s not the end for her, it’s the end for him. _She’ll see my face again. But I won’t see hers._ Some things go unsaid because people are not brave enough to say them, because they stop themselves in time. But some things must be said.

If he must lose, then at least he’ll have this, this one thing he didn’t think he deserved, this goodbye he lost the last time. This last goodbye at the end of their crossroads.

“I suppose, if it’s my last chance to say it, Rose Tyler, I… love you.”

Peacefully, the Doctor breathes out.

Angrily, grumpily, Rose stomps across the short distance between them.

There’s been no shortage of this in his many travels. He’s got one of those faces. He’s got the charisma, maybe. People all around will just be drawn to it, gift him with such a characteristic display of human victory and affection, all in one go. When Rose does it, it’s not that. It wasn’t that, either, when he did it. He willingly accepted the end of his life for her, to keep Rose as Rose, warm but not burning, human and not godlike. He faced another regeneration that perhaps was out of turn, faced her little scared reaction when he emerged out of the light, wearing this face, not the one she’d grown to love. She needed a Doctor then, and she’d had him.

He needs Rose now, at the end of their road. And he has her.

He could keep her. He could keep her in the TARDIS with him forever, like she had promised once. They all promise that. But she’s got her mom and her dad and her brother here. And… he knows too much to let her. They all must leave some time.

Even he must leave them, sometimes. Seal her off in her own universe, safe with her own Doctor. A Doctor human enough to live and die by her side. The greatest gift. One day, maybe, if her heart is in the right place, and the stars are, too, she will truly understand why.

The Doctor always leaves.

**Author's Note:**

> Not gonna lie, I just finished watching Series 4, the last series I had left before fully catching up with Doctor Who, so... yeah. Feelings. It felt fitting to post this now.


End file.
